The freshly laid egg is extremely fragile but within a day its surface has hardened into a shell. The glow-worm begins its life in the autumn as a pale yellow egg. Today members of the Firefly family can be found almost anywhere outside the Arctic and Antarctic circles.Īs with many insects, the glow-worm’s life is divided into four distinct stages: the egg, the larva (equivalent to the caterpillar of a butterfly), the pupa (or chrysalis) and the adult. Wherever they first arose, fireflies have since spread to almost every part of the globe.
The highest concentrations of firefly species today are to be found in the tropics of South America, which may mean either that this is where they First evolved, or simply that they prefer the conditions there.
It is impossible to be sure exactly when and where the first Firefly appeared. Girls threaded them around their feet to illuminate the forest paths at night.įireflies very similar to those we see today have been found fossilised in rocks which were formed about 30 million years ago, and their ancestors were probably glowing long before then. Early travellers in the New World came back with similar stories, of how the native people of Central America would collect a type of click beetle and release them indoors to light up their huts. In Britain, for example, there are plenty of anecdotes describing how glow-worms have been used to read by or used as emergency bicycle lamps when a cyclist’s batteries have failed without warning. All over the world, they have been the inspiration for countless poems, paintings and stories. Fireflies often featured in Japanese and Arabian folk medicine. It is described in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia written over 2000 years ago by a pupil of Confucius. The fireflies’ almost magical light has attracted human attention for generations. So within any one area each species will differ from its neighbours in some way, For example in the colour or pattern of its light, how long the pulses of light last, the interval between pulses and whether it displays in flight or from the ground.
The light is used by the adult fireFlies as a signal to attract a mate, and each species must develop its own ‘call-sign’ to avoid being confused with other species glowing nearby.
The feature which makes fireflies and glow-worms so appealing is their ability to produce an often dazzling display of light. The fireflies are a huge group containing over 2000 species, with new ones being discovered all the time. The glow-worm belongs to a family of beetles known as the lampyridae or fireflies.
0 kommentar(er)
